


The Demon of Erasure and Forgetting

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 21:44:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4762100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Mistress always chooses life. Always chooses to survive. Even when surviving is the hardest thing, the most painful thing. </p><p>But to make a choice, you have to have command of the relevant information.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Demon of Erasure and Forgetting

 

The human girl, Clara, hates her, and Missy doesn’t know why.

It’s strikingly evident that Clara also _pities_ her, which isn’t so much a sharp sting as it is a stab, and she doesn’t know why that should be either.

Apparently, she would rather be hated than be pitied. Especially by her.

~

He says her name is Missy, says he’s called her this every day, and that it is his honour to do so. But underneath the sounds of that name, she senses there is more. Syllables unspoken. Meaning suppressed. The implication of the diminutive is that there’s a longer form, from which she has been curtailed.

She doesn’t ask, because she doesn’t want to make them lie.

They’re lying so much already.

~

Clara and the Doctor come laughing in from the rain, crowded close as though under an umbrella. Missy feigns she hasn’t been waiting for them as they stand in the doorway, shaking water from their coats. But she hands Clara a towel for her hair, watches as the Doctor runs his hands through his, the droplets flick-flickering away in all directions, each a fat, bright, glistening prism that she freezes in her vision as they wick from the silver strands and fly into the air.

It’s a neat trick, this. Something she didn’t know she could do until, watching him, she wished that she could look for longer, examine every detail. Now, she often attenuates moments like these, lives them slowly, lingers over the present as a surrogate for the past.

Do they know? Does he? He pauses with his hands still on his scalp, catching her looking. She shrugs a little, and he looks away before Clara emerges from the towel to gaze up at him.

What else does he expect her to do? What else can she do?

~

They huddle together, leaning towards each other, making plans. Missy has no part in this, expects none, because she remembers none. They sit on the stair in the console room or in the reading nook below the overhang, talking quietly, and she stands behind the railing above them, afloat, caught on a fulcrum, upon a perpetual passage.

It doesn’t matter that she can’t hear them, because as soon as time moves forward she’ll have no memory of what they’ve said.

Sometimes, she thinks that she’s retained a little. That she’s managed to write something to memory. A phrase comes to mind she doesn’t think she’s invented, echoed in one of their voices or one she doesn’t recognise. The Doctor and Clara disappear somewhere and when they come back, somehow she knows where they’ve been. She thinks, maybe if she closes her eyes, she can conjure a crystallised fragment of yesterday, so carefully studied and analysed.

Her body learns. Her hands learn. She didn’t always know how to coax living flowers from dead dust. At least, she thinks she didn’t; probably not; the Doctor and Clara don’t act as though she did. The flowers only seem to baffle Clara, who carefully ignores their presence in the shared space of their lives. The Doctor frowns over them, like they’re as much a puzzle to him as Missy’s own mind is to her.

And in spite of all the things she can’t remember, she knows their names, though she doesn’t know how she knows them.

~

They laugh a lot.

They fight, too.

During the worst fights, Clara shoots agitated, aggrieved glares at Missy, and the Doctor goes out of his way not to follow the line of sight over his shoulder, avoids looking too. Missy bends her head over her plants, programming light cycles into her memory aide, the handheld device that retains the information she can’t and which is therefore vital to her daily functions.

When Clara storms away, Missy doesn’t know why it makes her feel pleased.

The Doctor stays behind but he won’t speak, won’t say a word. He’s fuming, and at times like these, he doesn’t want her to set aside her pruning clippers and go to him--another thing of which she is absolutely certain, though she can’t explain how she learned it.

These are the fights whose resentful aftermath is so long Missy forgets how they started, or whether they had a beginning at all. When Clara reappears, the Doctor cajoles her with whirling antics, he beguiles her with long anecdotes (anecdotes that seem to tug at the tip of Missy’s tongue), seduces her with trips outside the TARDIS doors.

At some point, Clara relaxes, and the mood shifts back to normal like glass panels re-aligning. She uncrosses her arms and rests her hand on his elbow, brushes the back of his wrist. The smile he smiles when he is forgiven is toothy and cherubic, and Missy pauses that, too, pretends she can store the image for later, when she needs it.

~

They laugh a lot.

Sometimes she laughs too, though it sounds wrong in her ears, high and inauthentic as though even her own voice were a stranger to her.

Sometimes, she’s sure, they laugh at her, and in her nightmares--somehow, she still has nightmares, though only the feeling of having had one stays with her--his face is huge and sneering as he laughs endlessly, mocking her when she forgets the dead ends and locked doors of the TARDIS corridors and checks them again and again, running repeatedly over the same stretch of labyrinth, his image filling her sky.

~

She doesn’t sleep much, tries not to sleep at all. Crawling out of the bewilderment that is sleep is harder than running for her life, harder than survival. To wake in a panic before you even know who you are, to wake unarmoured into a blank sensation of hostility, resentment, antagonism...she used to drift, half-insensate, half-meditating, into the full consciousness of pain, her skin, her skin...

Before she can scream, she sees the device, its blinking alarm light catching her attention. She reaches for it, and its bright screen leads her away from memory.

It tells her who she is: Missy.

It reminds her of the things, the very few things she knows.

It gives her the ability to live a sort of half life, gives her the independence to pick herself off the floor plate where she finally gave in to sleep, curled against its unyielding surface because she refuses to keep a mattress in her room; to wash her own face and brush her own hair and find a fresh set of clothes and know how the alien layers are meant to fasten. It allows her to lift the hinged lid on the finely-carved box that holds her gloves as though they were the most precious of gems, to run the pads of her fingers over the dense fine pile of dark velvet as though caressing someone’s hand.

They’re important, the gloves are important. Putting them on is like a ritual; they fit her perfectly, like they were made for her from meticulous measurements. She would never venture out without them. At work in the console room, or in the greenhouse, she forgets she’s wearing them, they’re so precisely cut, and for once the forgetting is not a failure of her mind.

~

“Imagine...imagine you walk into Coal Hill School. It’s midday, term time, a Wednesday. And the desks are still there, the chalk boards and the pencils and the composition books are all there. The teachers are there too, up at the fronts of their classrooms, reciting Shakespeare and setting sums and mangling history. And the pencils are writing away and the computers are clacking away and in the canteen the dinner lady is ladling chips onto dinner trays. And there are no children. None at all. The chips are spilling over onto the floor there are so many, the screens are blank, and the pencils are writing but no words appear. The pages are blank. All the pages are blank, in all the books in the entire school. But the school is working. The teachers are teaching. Sums are being set, and solved, all of them correctly--I know that’s not likely at your school, but just use your imagination for the metaphor--all day, every day. What would you think of that?”

“That’s horrible. That’s not a school. That isn’t _life_. It’s perverse.”

“That’s what it’s like. That's why I don't like to--”

The Doctor’s head snaps around as Missy turns the corner, his eyes alarmed. Then, his face does something deliberate and difficult, his expression closes off, and he falls silent.

~

She watches on the viewscreen as they run for it, hand in hand, the Doctor in the lead hurrying Clara along, the roaring, toothed thing chasing them gaining ground even as they sprint as fast as they can. They come to a barrier, a short cliff, and the Doctor pushes Clara ahead of him, lifting her so that she can reach for the top and pull herself up. He jumps for it, makes it on the third try, and scrambles after her, willfully falling behind.

Missy evaluates their progress, and the rate of the creature’s pursuit, and makes an automatic, incontestable calculation.

She pushes her mind into the control console, fingers flying on the unwieldy buttons even as she bargains with the TARDIS to let her in, to let her work. _This is an emergency!_

The safety disengages with a sticky reluctance, and suddenly she’s free to reconfigure settings she’d forgotten existed, and she programmes urgently, never taking her eyes from the display even as she rips into one of the panels to get at the wiring, tearing her glove and with it her fingernail or skin or whatever it is that sends a sour sharp white pain shocking through her when it catches on a jagged edge and pulls away.

“Hold on, hold on. Keep running...run faster. Come _on_ , you antique, _work_ with me!”

Outside, they’re within sight of the TARDIS, the monster that wants to rip them to shreds steps from the Doctor.

Missy slams the activate switch with all the force of her mind and her undamaged hand and stares intently into the screen as a beam shoots from the roof lamp, finding its mark with perfect accuracy.

As the light fades, the Doctor and Clara look around in confusion. Then the Doctor retraces his steps, his eyes fixed on the ground ahead of him. He crouches in the grass, searching among the blades, and his shoulders stiffen. He turns to scowl directly into the camera, his rage a palpable force even through the viewscreen.

In his hands, the lifeless, miniatuarised remains of the creature that almost killed him.

~

He’s looking everywhere but into her eyes as he peels the shredded glove from her hand to run the regenerator over the damage. There’s blood all down her palm, coagulating already, and he focusses intently on the damp cloth he’s using to clean it away.

Her hand throbs, and she can’t remember why. He keeps her wrist pinned against the table, fingers fastidious around the cuff of her sleeve as the ticklish, tingling light knits tissues and repairs skin, and then, job done, stands up abruptly and stalks away, his own hands shoved deep into his pockets.

She wonders what they feel like, whether they’re cold, whether they’re rough, whether they shake, if that tremor is always there, too small to see. Missy examines her healed hand as though it might provide answers. It’s fine now, not even aching, and soon she’ll forget it had hurt at all. Only the lacquer missing from one nail stands out as a hint that anything has happened, that anything ever happens. That what she’s living is a _life_.

~

Clara stares at her.

Missy can’t say how long this has been happening.

She stares back.

They look into each other’s eyes, she thinks, for a long time.

~

There are eyes and they aren’t looking at her, and there’s a face and it’s laughing, and she can’t think, there’s so much static and so much noise because her hearts are pounding in her chest, and she can barely see because she’s barely breathing and she’s breathing too fast, and all she knows is she has to move she has to run she has to get away; she’s running down a corridor and then the same corridor again and the corridor hates her and she doesn’t know why and the corridor pities her and the corridor won’t work with her and maybe the corridor is looping in on itself to spite her but she doesn’t know she can’t remember she’s been running forever she can’t remember not running maybe it’s the corridor that’s laughing at her the corridor that’s always been laughing at her running, hollow, a lie.

She doesn’t know who she is, she doesn’t know her name, and if she doesn’t know her name, she’s no one. She’s alive but the book of her life is a blank and there are pages torn out and big smeary grey erasures where the writing has been rubbed out and the paper worn thin and ripped and rough her nail, one of her nails was unlike the others she’s broken she needs repairing she needs a doctor she needs a doctor a doctor doctor--

Arms slip around her shoulders, holding her, a woman’s arms, a girl’s. She’s crouched on an unyielding floor, her elbows around her knees, and her chest feels like her hearts have burst out of it. Her throat is ragged, as though she’s been screaming. She blinks tears from her eyes and he’s in front of her, sitting on his heels, brow furrowed, mouth a thin, downturned line.

“Doctor…”

He looks past her for a moment at the speaker--the girl, who sounds concerned, wary, warning--and then back to her again, and after this he seems to let go of something inside himself. His shoulders sag, and his face gentles carefully, and he reaches for her bare hands.

Then he’s inside her head.

Doctor. He’s the Doctor. That’s the first thing, the most important thing, the thing she had almost remembered and cried out for, lost in her own panic and disorder, before they came for her, before they found her.

And she’s Missy.

_Who is Missy? Missy who?_

Just…Missy.

_Missy. Missy missy miss missymissss...it loses its meaning, doesn’t it? Who’s Missy Missy Missy? Weeee! Isn’t this fun?_

Stop it.

_Oh. I’m Missy. That, that’s my name. That’s who I am._

Yes. I’m sorry. I should have come more often, been here sooner, to remind you.

An image escapes his extensive defenses and into her mind, of a school with no students, miming empty motions like a clockwork, forever.

 _You were afraid._ It’s a revelation. She’d thought she was the only one. _You_ are _afraid, still._

I’m so sorry.

~

He finds the device stashed beneath the fronds of a potted plant, heavy with blooming flowers.

“You hid this,” he says, waving it at her accusingly.

“Did I?” She waits for him to tell her. She’s the one incapable of lying, the only one who can have nothing to lie about, no way to remember a lie. Or a truth.

“Well, Clara certainly didn’t.”

“Don’t ask me why I hid it, Doctor. I didn’t know it was lost.”

“Of course you kn--no. No, you didn’t know it was lost.” He wipes his hands over his face. Takes a breath as though to speak, hesitates. “Missy…”

She looks at him expectantly, but when he has nothing to say, she holds her hand out for the device. She needs it.

He doesn’t seem to want to, but then he puts it in her palm, looking deflated. Defeated.

It’s strange. She would have thought she’d be more relieved that he’s given it back to her, that her life can continue.

~

The human girl, Clara, hates her, and Missy doesn’t know why.

It’s strikingly evident that Clara also _pities_ her, which isn’t so much a sharp sting as it is a stab, and she doesn’t know why that should be either.

Apparently, she would rather be hated than be pitied. Especially by her.

~

He says her name is Missy, says he’s called her this every day, and that it is his privilege to do so. She doesn’t remember, can’t remember. She must take it on faith, believe in the things they tell her.

They don’t tell her very much.


End file.
